The quality of customer service has a massive impact on how consumers interact with the service provider — whether that provider is an internal department, an outsource partner, or a company providing goods and services externally. Studies have shown that one out of two customers will stop doing business with a company because of a poor service experience.

For IT teams in close contact with end users as they manage IT migrations and Evergreen IT, or even staff the support desk, this means that self-service becomes a key enabler for these initiatives!

But this does not mean that call centers or support help desks are merely replaced by robots. 42% of consumers still want to speak to live agents to help them handle complex questions and requests. The same is true in IT migration. We often want to self-service the simple requests, but have human interaction where the migration is more complex.

The Role Of Self-Service In Today's IT Organizations

As IT becomes a more customer-centric service facilitator, the expectations of your end users will change significantly. They are now the consumers of the service that IT offers rather than just business units that are dependent on the IT department. They have the same expectations as private consumers when it comes to self-service and customer support — maybe even more so given that internal organizations should, in theory, be better placed to service their own requests. And as much as they love IT, some of them probably would rather clean a toilet than pick up the phone and speak to a support desk staff member.

Therefore, many enterprise IT organizations are working towards putting the user in the driver's seat. Self-service can empower them to become an active part of the process by enabling them, for example, to volunteer for an early Windows 10 migration if they are ready (or even if they are not), rather than telling them what and when it will be done. This empowerment is often considered part of the CIO digital transformation agenda, and a critical element of managing the ongoing Windows 10 servicing mode.

Implemented effectively, end users can benefit from greater visibility and better transparency, which can increase trust and customer satisfaction. For example, by dramatically reducing the cost of end user engagement with self-service, major initiatives such as IT Transformations can become zero-touch processes with a light touch setup and configuration. This can significantly reduce the need for heavyweight resource items such as scheduling, communications, and deployment resources.

Is Your IT Migration or Evergreen IT Initiative Ready For User Driven Self-Service? Take The Quiz To Find Out!

Not every organization is ready to offer self-service. They might not have the right technology, or the supporting business processes in place to deliver this new methodology to the end users. Equally, the culture of the organization may not be suitable for it. For example, we are currently working with a government department which includes senior judges as part of the IT transformation project. These individuals may not be the best candidates for self-service as they are used to high-touch IT support.

We have created this quick 10-question quiz to ascertain if your organization is ready to pursue a self-service-driven approach to your IT migration or Evergreen IT initiatives:

Conclusion

So, how did you do on the quiz? Whether you scored "100% ready" or "this might not be for you", you should ask yourself honestly what your user base is expecting. Even if you are pretty sure you know, it might be a good idea to take a quick poll since they might not have expressed their frustrations to you.

If you do decide to go the self-service direction, you should first consider the following questions:

Are the people delivering the service ready for a new way of working? This is the first question you should ask yourself (and your users). If your workforce mainly consists of tech-savvy millennials, you will approach self-service very differently from the judges I mentioned earlier.

Is your corporate culture accepting of this new methodology? Executive buy-in and full support is essential to making this work as this might require some significant organizational change management.

Are the processes robust and automated to deliver effective self-service? Self-service isn't something that can be done haphazardly — you must think through the entire process from beginning to end. However, this does not mean that you cannot pick one business use case to try out and get your toes wet.

Is the user experience defined and well understood? The adoption (and therefore the success) of your self-service initiative hinges upon the ease-of-use and intuitiveness of the tool. If it cannot be understood quickly without prior training, it won't work.

Are the tools in place to support the process? Last, but not least, in order to facilitate self-service effectively and provide your co-workers an exceptional user experience, your tooling must be easy-to-use and integrate into your IT Transformation Management tooling.

Barry is a co-founder of Juriba, where he is focused on using his experience in IT migration to help drive product strategy, pre-sales and service delivery. He is an experienced End User Services executive that has helped manage thousands of users, computers, applications and mailboxes to their next IT platform. He has saved millions of dollars for internal departments and customers alike through product, project, process and service delivery efficiency.